


when i need a hand to hold (would it be okay if i came home to you)

by goldenslumbersfanfiction



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Happy Ending, One Shot, becomes very fluffy and a little smutty don't you fret, mostly Jamie's thoughts, which are filled with pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 19:13:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29069349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenslumbersfanfiction/pseuds/goldenslumbersfanfiction
Summary: 'And maybe you can’t understand peace just yet, but you can understand boring, and maybe they’re not unlike one another all that much. As the buds of your moonflower dwindle, you find yourself staring at the stars with them, wondering why you can’t bloom for the hell of it too.'Or, Dani isn’t ready for company, Jamie thinks a lot, gets a cat, and learns what peace can mean, and they both take a year to grow.
Relationships: Dani Clayton & Jamie, Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 30
Kudos: 111





	when i need a hand to hold (would it be okay if i came home to you)

It starts and ends with you holding out your hand. She’s sitting next to you, looking wrecked and forlorn, eyes red and swollen, the picture of despair and it’s breaking you. 

She tells you no, through silent tears, that she doesn’t want your company. 

“S’fine,” you say and you try to believe it. “Whatever you need.” You pull her in and kiss her forehead instead. You try to understand, because you don’t want to upset her further, and it was only just a last-second idea you had, but really, you’re upset, and you feel the rejection of it like slow molasses in your veins, sticky and tangy and clogging your heart. 

You drive Dani to the airport, because that was the original plan before you offered to pack up your life in an hour and join her. She’s silent the whole time it takes you to get there, her eyes are unblinking and staring out the window in a way that makes you ache with the thought of plopping her on a plane alone, not knowing when you’ll see her again.

“Offer still stands, y’know.” You try, one last time. 

“Thank you. I’ll…I’ll let you know.”

“Call when you land?”

She nods but it doesn’t look like it reaches her brain at all. It’s not like you’re worried she can’t take care of herself, you know she can, even now, even still, but in the short weeks, _god, weeks_ , you’ve known her, you just want to be beside her. The world has been cruel to you, cruel to Dani, every time you both have asked it for something good, every time you’ve both tried to take something you could cherish with greedy hands, it had only ever ended in scars. You realize, as she gets out of the car, that will probably never change. 

She closes the door and looks at you through the window. Her eyes slide right off of you like there was never any magnetism, never even a few sparks of static electricity to keep you fused together. She turns, and then she’s gone. 

You watch her walk all the way in until you can’t see her anymore, and you’ve made big mistakes before with precision and stupidity, and you wonder if you’ve just made another. You sit there, in your truck, for god knows how long after. Eventually though, you’re getting aggressively honked at, and you drive back to Bly. 

You’re grateful you never had the opportunity to bring Dani back to your flat, otherwise you’d be tearing down the walls and setting fire to every surface she touched. 

//

You thought you would hate being back at the manor, alone, and while it’s not where you wish you were, it’s not as bad as you thought. You told Henry you would do it despite his insistence you didn't have to, and he’s paying you more than double to wrap up the loose ends and get the house ready for winter. You like that he trusts you, and you like that you have something to do with your hands, and you did love this place. 

If nothing else, you had the vegetable garden plotted to produce through December, so your groceries are covered, you suppose. Though you’ll have to call Owen to ask him how the fuck to cook an aubergine. 

//

You spend the evenings with your moonflower. You think about how this plant picked the stars, chose the darkness, to only bloom for the lucky ones. And you are, a lucky one. Night after night. With this white face, shy, then radiant, staring back at you whispering, _It’s you. It’s us._ You sit there in the night with it, and you think it chose the darkness not for the cover of night to hide, but for the serenity it grants. For the view into the galaxy, something far beyond and far greater that it might never even reach, but it is content enough to wish, and it just needs peace. And as you look into the anthers, this webbed open star, you think how you don’t have the kind peaceful darkness this flower demands. That you are just sad, and you miss her. And maybe you can’t understand peace just yet, but you can understand boring, and maybe they’re not unlike one another all that much. As the buds dwindle, you find yourself staring at the stars with them, wondering why you can’t bloom for the hell of it too. 

//

It’s just been you at the manor, though sometimes Owen will pop in to collect some fancy cooking tool he left behind, and it feels like mourning. As you sit alone in the kitchen with a cup of tea before you start your day in earnest, watching the dust float through a patch of early sunlight, you think about all the ways that grief can look.

You can’t remember much of your mum, but you heard she passed last year. She was still young, you suppose. Owen had asked if you needed anything, but you honestly didn’t feel sad. You didn’t feel much of anything, and you were more upset that day when you’d discovered a fern you’d grown from a cutting had root rot. You’d normally have tossed the whole thing, it was nearly beyond saving and really not worth your effort. But you went through and cut off each dead and infected stem, for hours and hours and into the night. It’s a huge plant now, and it sits in the corner of your flat.

You think about Denny, and how he was swallowed whole by pressure and expectation to be something hateful and cruel to you. And you can’t forgive him for all he’s said to you, but you think you’ve done a good enough job at patching up the destruction he caused in your self-worth. It still echoes, though it doesn’t sting anymore, and you’re not better for it, but you’re something different, something you worked for.

You think of Mikey, a sweet babe when you last saw him, already branded with the pain of your efforts to keep him safe and fed, trying to fill a hole in your lives you couldn’t grasp the enormity of when you were both so small.

You think of Miles and Flora, and what it means to be raised. You don’t know if you were too good at lovingly molding their minds, but as you pick the green beans and savoy cabbages from the vines of the vegetable garden, you think, like you often do, about how every living thing comes from every dying thing. How you sowed your love for those two messy children into this garden for over two years, into the food that would build the cells of their bones as they grew. You think, as far as child rearing goes, that making sure they had more food in one month than you had in an entire year when you were their age means that maybe you did a fine job after all, and maybe your debt for a forgotten pot of boiling water has been paid. You’ve never been one for praying, but you go into the chapel on the anniversary of Dominic and Charlotte’s deaths, light two candles and beg, to whatever good thing is rolling the dice, that their children do not remember a goddamn thing about the nightmare that happened on these grounds. 

You grieve for Hannah, as Owen helps you go around the manor and cover the furniture in white sheets, monuments to the ghosts, reduced to shapes, and you wonder what you missed. You think, with a bitter churn in your belly you don’t deserve, that if someone loves you well enough, they could fight the ghosts wracking their body to stay with you, just a little bit longer. 

//

It’s five weeks in when you get a letter from Dani, and for all it says, it could have been blank. 

She doesn’t say where she is, or who she’s met. Or how she’s doing, or feeling. She doesn’t say she misses you. She says she’ll send a letter again soon, and you are left so confused by it. She sounds like a robot, and you have the impulse to throw it right into the bin, because you’re finally allowing yourself to feel just a bit angry at her and it hurts when you think, maybe, that you’ll have to move on.

But there’s a little leaf design on the front of it, and she signs it _‘Yours, Dani,’_ so you tuck it into the drawer next to your bed.

//

You feel it, this passing through of time, the end of something complex and whole, as you watch the last buds of the moonflower open, give one last shimmering show before morning, when you’ll pull the stretching vines down with careful hands and lay them to rest in your compost bin. 

You never understood funerals. The finality of them. Sealing a body off inside a box, talking about only the mind and how it’s drifted somewhere special, someplace better. You always thought in the end, you might like to be a tree next, tuck yourself in under a sapling and let it drink you so you can reach taller the next go around. Have someone carve their heart into you, climb your branches, and have some cheese and honey under your shade. 

//

You’re on your knees pulling weeds up from deep in the dirt when the cat comes, and you think with an exasperated groan, that your sadness and misery can’t possibly be so palpable to the universe that this sprightly little thing thought it needed to trot right into your life to cheer you up. You hate him, when he headbutts your chin when you’re low to the ground, and gets in your way, and splays his little body all over the dirt piles you make, and you shoo him every time, but he’s a persistent little fucker.

You’re in the kitchen a week after he first arrived, and you hear him fighting and clawing with another beast. When your curiosity gets the best of you, you crack open the door to see if he’s going to finally meet his end, and damn your begrudging fondness for him when he runs clean into the manor for refuge and you can not get him to leave. You curse, but, you suppose, you did invite him in, and now you just have to deal with it. And as far as little devils go, it could be worse.

You call him Weed.

//

It’s November, and Owen calls you, and when you ask him if he wants company, he says yes. 

You drive to the cemetery in silence, and keep a steady hand on his back when he crumbles at seeing the grass that has grown above Hannah’s grave, thick and green. It feels like being pushed, squeezed, shoved along through time kicking and screaming. 

You get a drink with him at a bar, a real bar, and he pays for a nice bottle of cava and you toast, to who the fuck knows what. You just clink your glass against his, and share this _look._ To your grief, maybe. To going through it. To knowing that neither of you is alone yet, if you’re sharing a bottle.

He leaves for Paris the next week, and you feel the loss of him stronger than you thought you would. It’s just you left now, to tend to the ghosts. You know eventually you’ll wrap up your life here, find your next stop, but you still have a bit more time left in Bly to tie up all the loose ends. 

As you walk along the edge of the property, having a break and a smoke, you see the mist from the lake. You feel comfort, somehow, knowing you’re here to guard her from it. You’re not quite ready to let her go yet, or even if you should, and that’s fine. It hurts less, to live in the purgatory of her shadow, to dance around the ghosts of your memories on these grounds, not quite ready to accept the death of it, but not really able to think of her too strongly either. You just exist. You’re just here. You’re just Jamie with the plants, and for now, you think, it’s fine.

//

You’d saved her room for last when you went around switching out the old door hinges, and when you twist the knob on the door that was only hers for less than two months, you marvel at how fast something can grow, and how much faster it can die. 

You’re standing in her room, in a crypt, the bed stripped bare and furniture covered in sheets and you push down everything you want to scream into these walls. You just have to finish this task, and then you can go home.

You remember when you were told the new au pair was arriving and she was _from America_ and honestly, you didn’t want to know her. No one would understand the hole Rebecca left, the vortex she was sucked into that left the rest of you flailing in the destruction of it, and when you walked into the kitchen that day and saw this new thing sitting there in her fluffy pink shirt, you wanted nothing to do with her. 

But you admired her tenacity, when she showed she was tougher than she looks. She was the good kind of hard on those kids in a way no one had been for ages. And when you caught her heaving behind a hedge on the cusp of panic, you made sure she knew that you’d made space for her in your orbit, tugged on her lightly enough just to set your gravitational pull into action, so she could circle back to you when she needed, and it felt like enough.

You’re on your hands and knees, turning a screw on a bottom hinge when you see it, glinting under the bed. 

You think at first, something from your tool box must have rolled under. It’s too far to reach, and you aren’t prepared when you push the bed over and see an orphaned silver earring laying there. It had been discarded, you remember, with a sharp clarity you’d been trying to fog up, in a fit of giggles when your finger had gotten caught through the loop as you were pulling her sweater over her head and you’d tugged her ear so hard she yelped. Sweater still half on her body, she had quickly taken them off and tossed them, somewhere. You couldn’t stop apologizing through your laughter, rubbing her ear to soothe the pull, but she told you _‘I’m fine, can you shut up?’_ and kissed your smile, and pulled her sweater off the rest of the way and...

The thing about orbits though, is that everything that comes in close enough to touch drifts away just as quickly.

//

You try sleeping with someone else and it fails worse than you want to admit. It’s not your first time with her. Options are slim in Bly, and you’ve had an understanding the handful of times before. But your skin feels like rubber as she kisses at your neck, your stomach. Unable to conduct any sort of electricity and making you feel tight and inflexible.

You push through the feeling because you’re so lost and drunk, and you were the one who asked her to your flat, after all, and you know you won’t find anything of value in her, but it’s something to do. 

You make it halfway through, she’s clutching at your back and tight around your fingers, when you stop and apologize because this feels so wrong and you can not stand it one more second. She seems disappointed but she doesn’t push, and you’re grateful. You don’t have to tell her it’s not her, that it’s your messy head and weary heart, but you think from the way she helps you put your shirt back on, and rubs her hand along your shoulder, gives you a sweet sort of smile, that she knows. You let her sleep over, because you’re not a monster, at least not anymore, and if you close your eyes and ride the wave of the alcohol crashing in your blood, it could be Dani next to you in bed. 

You don’t have much of a memory of that to feast upon, just the one night, but lord knows you try to squeeze it for all its worth. When you wake up, she’s gone.

//

She calls you a little over two months in. It’s four in the morning, and you know it’s her because she’s crying, pained and scared but determined in her conviction. You manage to get her to tell you she’s at a hotel in Ireland, and really, you’re shocked. Two months and she’s barely 200 kilometers away. Two months of you imagining the oceans and haunts and millions of people she put between you. 

“Just...needed to hear your voice.” She gets it out through a sob and you’re ready to swim across the channel to hold her in your shivering arms if she needs you to. You tell her as much, and you can’t see her but you know she’s nodding, that she knows. 

“I’m not ready, Jamie. I’m still... I _can’t._ ”

“S’alright.” You say, but it feels anything but and you just want to hold her hand. 

“I’m trying.”

“I’m just a phone call away, you know that, Poppins.”

She lets out a watery something. A laugh or a sob, or her heart trying to kiss you through the receiver at hearing you call her that name for the first time in two months. You wonder how little she feels seen where she is. You wonder if that’s the point. 

You’re silent on the phone for almost an hour. You think she’s fallen asleep at least 20 minutes ago, not able to hang up on her steady breath despite your heavy muscles and scratchy eyelids, when you hear a light, “Jamie?”

“Hmm? I’m here.”

“I’ll call more. Promise.”

You say goodnight, and neither of you mention the fact that the sky outside is already the perfect shade of hazy light blue.

//

You talk to Dani almost every week now, or really, she calls you, and she sometimes speaks. Mostly, you just narrate your day, what you’re making for dinner, the plants you’re growing, and the stoves and door jambs you’ve fixed around town for extra cash.

But you hear Dani went back to Iowa from Owen. 

You met him in London for dinner and some properly fancy cocktails that he likes so much. It was a good night. You’d never known what it felt like to truly have family, but with Owen, you think it’s close. You tease and hug him. He complains how smoking will mess up your tastebuds and you call him a prat and blow smoke on his mustache. Someone mistakes you for a couple, and without missing a beat the both of you lean into it so hard the person must recognize their mistake, calling each other ‘sweetheart’ and ‘honeybun’ every sentence, your hand on his shoulder, him batting his eyelashes at you like a princess. You laugh and it’s wonderful, the absurdity of the thing. As if either of you could have it so easy. As if neither of you are in love with ghosts. He orders you this infused mezcal concoction, it’s spicy, and you don’t talk about the pain. 

It’s late and your belly is full with so much. You’re drinking something you know will push your budding headache over the edge into a proper hangover tomorrow if you finish it, when Owen brings up Dani’s call, and the expensive liquor tastes like ash on your tongue when he says it.

You realize, with dread, what he’s saying around the words that come out of his mouth, like someone guessing all the wrong letters in hangman, getting closer and closer to peril but determined they’re playing another word game entirely. 

You retain everything he says, despite your swimming mind. Dani went back to Iowa and sold her house and her car, saw her mother. She didn’t plan on staying there longer than she needed to, just to make a yard sale of a life that made her numb before continuing on to wherever was next. He said it with pride for his friend, like he was glad she was finally laying that all to rest. And you suppose yes, that’s true. You’d be glad too, if it didn’t feel so much like Dani was getting her affairs in order, like sweeping up her mark on this earth to leave it cleaner than she found it, to minimize her ripples when she finally sinks into a lake. You want to scream, because all you want is for Dani to mark you up. Leave her trace. Drag her nails through your skin and make you a wreck. She had though, and she hasn’t come back to clean you up yet, and you wonder, with a pathetic sort of desire, when it will be your turn to be erased by her if only to see her one last time.

//

You cry when you get back to your flat the next afternoon, messy and heaving. Your back hurts from sleeping on Owen’s friend’s couch and from the train, and your head feels like cotton from holding back your tears and too much good liquor. There’s a new recording on the answering machine you got just for Dani, though you told her it was because Henry recommended you around town and you needed to be reachable. You want to crawl into bed, but hearing her voice isn’t much different.

“Jamie, hey...Are you there?” She waits, because this has happened before, with you just out of reach, stumbling across the flat to grab the phone too late. It squeezes your heart, knowing she waited for you, somewhere, sometime, and another tear falls onto your shirt. “Guess not...um, alright.” And she sounds a little sad she won’t get to talk to you, but she also sounds brighter than she has in weeks. “I just wanted to call and...I don’t know. I guess sometimes it’s nice to just know you’re there or...or hear about your day, and sometimes it’s good for me to say things even if they’re not really... and...I feel like I haven't really said anything, and I know that...but I wanted to let you know that it helps, you know? That’s all.” 

You crack a little, because this nervous rambling reminds you so much of the Dani you tried not to fall into. You can feel the ghost of your amused smirk haunting you. There isn’t much more to the message. Just a long distance number you write down that tells you she’s still in the states and a _‘Promise?’_ to return her call that makes you sink to the floor.

When she picks up, she can hear how thick your voice is, even as you try to smooth it over. She asks if you're okay. It’s the first time she’s really _asked_ about you and you don’t have it in you to lie.

“Um...not really. Not gonna get into it though, if that’s alright.”

Instead you launch into your usual pattern, telling her about that little fucking cat that won’t stop bumping against your legs while you’re trying to do your damn job. You tell her you met Owen in London last night, though, and get a curious little _‘Oh?’_

“Yeah...was great, apparently he can make awful puns in French now.” 

You don’t tell her what he said to you, and she doesn’t ask. She never asks. But you twist around it and you think she knows, because before you hang up she says your name with such care, like she knows she’s breaking you, but she’s also going to have to squeeze you a little tighter too. 

//

Weed has certainly been living up to his name. Not only has he grown more bold in his ( _ineffective_ ) affection for you, but he’s gotten quite a bit bigger, stretching long and skinny.

You’re pulling on your coat and having a smoke before you head home. It’s your last day working at the manor for a couple weeks, with everything wrapped up for the winter, and you notice him sitting tall and taunting on the hood of your truck, like he’s been waiting for you, and you think, _‘nope.’_

You have an honest to god stare down with him, looking directly into his beady little eyes as you finish your cigarette down the butt. When he just lays down on the hood not even breaking eye contact with you, you consider lighting another cigarette to make it clear to his walnut brain that _‘I have all fucking night, you’re not winning this one.’_

But he gives a little mew as if to say _‘So do I, nice try’_ , and you sigh, big and exasperated, and you throw your cigarette on the floor, smash it with your boot, and walk over to the truck. 

He hops off and brushes against your legs, back curling and tail twisty and making himself look like a little prick, and you could kick him clean over the hedges if you tried hard enough. But when you open the door he jumps right in. He explores the inside a bit, and settles into the passenger seat next to you. 

He doesn’t startle when you start the engine like you hoped he would, and as you drive down the path of the property, and through the winding roads, he props his front legs on the door handle and watches everything roll by. 

You won’t admit it, as he sniffs around your flat discovering his favorite spots, fresh and fur wet after you washed the dirt off him in the sink, but it’s nice to have the company. 

//

It’s Christmas, and while the holiday never really meant anything to you personally, you’d always been invited to the Wingraves and it was always a lovely time. After spending most of November decorating that manor, high up on ladders hanging lights and chopping down a huge fucking tree, you thought it was the least they could do was let you enjoy it on the day. 

Hannah always had such a beautiful time. It was a true celebration for her, and you loved watching her revel in her faith, scared a little at how someone can believe in something you can’t be sure is even there. You try to call Owen, but he doesn’t answer, and you can’t blame him and you don’t try again. 

You think about Dani, and hope she’s sipping hot chocolate or Bailey’s somewhere and treating herself to a present. A month ago, on your answering machine, she said you talking to her _helps_ , but she hasn’t called you in almost three weeks, and you worry.

When the new year rolls around with no call or no letter, you try calling the last number you managed to get from her. That’s not usually how it works, Dani is usually the one to reach out, and all you get is a prim sounding receptionist at a hotel somewhere in a state you honestly did not even know existed. You can tell she’s not really supposed to give this sort of information out, but you must sound concerned. The low, apologetic drop in her voice when she says _‘That guest checked out two weeks ago. I’m sorry, I don’t have any more information...I hope you find her,’_ does nothing to comfort you.

//

You take a couple shifts at the pub, and while it’s not green, it’s cash. It’s nice to be surrounded, not by people, but by noise and things to do. It’s a welcome distraction from feeling like you’ve missed a connecting flight, suspended in a liminal space, not sure to head home or continue on your journey. 

Stan senses your confusion, your restlessness, and at the end of every shift when you help close up, you play a game of darts. He doesn’t offer up much by way of conversation and you’re grateful. You really wouldn’t know where to begin. But he has that intuitive calmness, that understanding of people, that’s come from 50 years of being a small town barkeep. He knows all about passing through, all about sadness. He never lets you win, but you think that’s alright. 

//

You get a postcard from Anchorage that was dated two weeks prior, January 5th.

Her scrawl looks weak, and she’s not giving anything away, and you’re forced to read between the lines.

You think you’ve made a mistake, letting her go, or holding on, and the idea of either of them being true makes your chest feel like it’s filled with thorns. And you are angry with yourself because now she’s in fucking _Alaska_ and you should have just swam the damn channel when she first called you up. 

You know people are difficult, and messy, and burdensome, and hard to decipher, and they lie, and they twist the truth, and they let you down, and you’ve always made a point to avoid it. But despite it all, the one time you offer to take it on, you’re left scratched and bleeding, trapped in the ugliest parts of a rose bush picking flowers for someone who doesn’t even want them.

//

She calls you on February 3rd, almost a month and a half since you last heard from her, and when you ask where she’s been, if she’s ok, you get a tired _‘Jamie...’_ and honestly, you’ve had it. You wanted to be warm, and calm, and welcoming, and everything she makes you feel because you can’t possibly understand what she’s going through, but before you can control your rising anger, you’re letting her have it.

“Look, you don’t owe me answers. But Dani...it’s been _five months_. Every time I get a call from you, every time I get a letter, it feels less and less like _you_ and it doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything to stop it! Do you even remember what you’re looking for in...where the fuck even are you?!”

You take a breath, and close your eyes, collect yourself before you drive her away even more. 

“I’m sorry, I just...you said you were trying. I really...I really want to believe you, Dani...You’re not gone, yet, you know? You’re still here.”

The line is so silent, you’re convinced she hung up on you halfway through your tirade.

“I know...” She sounds so broken, still, almost half a year later. “You’re right...I...I want to believe it, too.”

You’re no stranger to knowing what it’s like being trapped inside of a box, and you think of those hard, chocolate eyes that collected the words that fell out of your mouth like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle just to keep her busy, and you tell Dani what Tamara told you. 

“When I ask you how you’re doing, I need you to tell me the truth. Even if it’s bad, even if it makes you feel weak. You don’t have to get into it...but you need to hear it out loud, okay? It starts there.”

It helps, slowly, like you hoped it would, like it did for you. You start and end every call with it, being someone to tell the truth to, so she can hear it, so she can believe it, and so she can take it from there however she needs. Sometimes it’s hard for you to hear, other times you’re filled with a spark of hope. When she tells you she feels like she’s crumbling at the beginning, but by the end of your call you can feel her smile on her lips, so genuine you can almost imagine it, when she tells you _‘Thank you...I feel a lot better’_ in a voice you know is _hers_ , it feels like getting caught in a sunshower, joyful and pure and every drop glimmering gold. 

//

You’re back on the grounds at the manor. It’s really not where you thought you would be, it’s not at all where you want to be, but it’s only one or two days a week. You’re dropped in the wreckage of winter that left this place twisted and barren, hedges overgrown and branches broken like severed limbs, but you see the small glint of spring too, the green buds growing on skeleton trees, reminding them that just because the winter was unrelenting, doesn’t mean they have to be barren forever, and just like that, it changes something in you. 

It’s the hardest thing you’ve done, and somehow, the easiest and most natural, when you call up Henry and tell him it’s time, and that you’re more than happy to stay on for however long he needs and help find a replacement for you, but it’s time for you to move on. Something about it feels like freedom, something about it feels like running, and you can’t decipher anymore if that’s good or bad anymore, but you just know you have to do it anyway.

//

Despite all of it, Dani has been drifting again. It’s approaching April, and you try to keep her on the phone longer and longer because she’s calling less and less. Her voice sounds reedy and thin most times, and you try to get answers from her any way you can, even if they’re just little hums to tell you she’s listening. You ask where she is every time, where she’s staying, because you know at this point if you got anything detailed enough for you to go to her, you’d do it. 

You feel her teetering on the edge, and you think, maybe, if you were there, you could hold her in place just a little bit longer. 

//

Stan can see in your clipped conversation with regulars, in your hunched stance, that you’re struggling. When you're on your stool after you close up, he sits next to you and instead of handing you your set of darts, he puts his hand on your shoulder, tells you whatever troubles you will pass, and you cry. He doesn’t ask, but you tell him as much as you can and he listens.

Maybe this was what Dani couldn’t figure out how to tell you through the thick fog of it at the beginning, that it would be better for you to have nothing of her to miss, except one night and a rejected invitation for more. Clean, you think. Except it feels anything but. It feels like a fucking mess.

// 

It’s 2am when you’re woken by a quick knocking on your door. You almost jump out of your skin, because this has only happened twice before. Once when there was a small fire in the pub, and another when some piss drunk lad got a little too curious. It was because of him you got the chain on the lock, and you curse it now, because you open the door the crack it allows and a slice of Dani Clayton is staring back at you against the pitch black night. 

You don’t know what to do, or what to say. You’re dreaming, surely. 

“Can I come in?” She says, and you stare at her for a moment too long and she says “Jamie?” and you slam the door a little too hard, fumbling with the chain and flinging the door open to the chill spring air. It brushes against your legs, making you shiver, and you realize you’re only in a t-shirt and your underwear, but you’re dazed enough to not care. 

Dani pushes in, tossing her backpack to the floor. 

“Dani? What’re you-” but before you can finish she’s burying her hands in your hair, pulling you in and kissing you right there like the first breath after almost drowning.

It’s the kind of kiss you didn’t think someone like Dani Clayton was capable of. It’s rough and desperate and absolutely _filthy_ in it’s dominance and she is so, _so_ sure of herself as she pushes you against the door, closing it with your body, one hand already under your sleep shirt, splayed against your ribs, and you grasp onto her in any way you can. 

You taste her tongue as it pushes into your mouth and you let out this pathetic little whimper and thank god you’re still holding onto the door handle or you might have fallen right to the floor. 

Dani’s hands are cold but quickly warming against your skin and you shiver as she grabs roughly at your waist under your shirt, pulling you flush against her. Your hands have found their way into her hair, tugging her as close to your body as you can. 

One hand slips up, farther under your shirt, grabbing at your breast, the other around your backside, and down, into your underwear to pull you hard against her thigh. Your head thumps back against the door and you gasp into her mouth. Your body feels like a flare inside of a cave, and you know you haven’t even come close to this feeling when you’ve thought of her. 

She nips at your bottom lip and soothes it over with her tongue and she whispers your name like it’s the answer into the crook of your neck as she slips her hand into your underwear, and bites down on your pulse and fucks you with two fingers against your door. 

Your head is swimming, and your eyes are watering with the intensity of it, and you don’t even know if this is real. She feels so real as you clutch her impossibly closer, taking all of her in, as much as you can before she evaporates, and your body is on fire in a way you’ve only ever felt once before.

You come quickly, with a loud cry into her mouth, holding on to her tightly as she brings you down. 

She is staring at you, at your lips, the skin between her eyebrows slightly wrinkled, and her thumb brushing against your jaw as you catch your breath, like she can’t believe you’re here, even though she’s the one that travelled for hours, maybe, days, to knock on your door while you slept. Her hands are shaking and holding on to you and you hear her say, _“Jamie”,_ and you lean in and kiss her, so gently, tell her, “I’m right here,” and you feel a sigh of relief escape her chest and wash over you. 

You stumble over to your bed, and undress her slowly. You wonder if you’ll get to ask her in the morning, if she’s still even here, if she came right from the airport. You suspect she has because you find a boarding pass in her jacket pocket as you tugged it off. 

She kisses you into the mattress when she's down to just her underwear, and you’re completely naked under her. She slides into you again and this time it’s slower, smoldering. Your hands are buried in her messy blonde hair as she builds toward your orgasm like stoking embers, like constructing a home, meticulous with a passionate kind of purpose, kissing your chest and your lips, pressing into your neck and moaning something like your name, something like a prayer, into your ear when she adds a third finger. She feels so good, and you tighten around her as her thumb swipes across your clit, your nails scratching tracks down her back. It burns you alive when you crack open for her, spilling all over her hand. 

She doesn’t let you touch her, not in the way that you really want to, but that’s okay. She does come against your thigh, and you almost lose your mind when you feel how wet she is through her underwear. She’s beautiful, taking her pleasure from you like she is new again and re-learning how to live, her hair spilling across your face as you kiss her through it.

It’s hours before she’s finished with you, and you try to sleep but despite it all, how heavy and languid your muscles feel, you’re still restless with her body next to you like she’s been there all along. You doze, eventually, but nothing deep enough to miss if she tries to slip away.

She sleeps late, it's 11am when she starts to stir, and you’ve already been up for hours, unable to really sleep, just staring at her in your bed from across the room as you sip your second, third cup of tea. 

You barely have anything in your kitchen that you could scrounge up as a breakfast for two, but you try. You’re having a go at frying an egg when you feel her come up behind you and sleepily wrap her arms around your middle, her head falling to the back of your neck, and you just stand like that, one of your hands covering hers, your thumb drawing little patterns on her forearm, the other figuring out breakfast on its own. It’s so painfully domestic and you wonder, with a stab of betrayal you don’t deserve, if this could have been every day had she looped her pinky with yours 8 months ago instead of gently cupping your hands, looking you in the eyes and shaking her head through terrified tears, whispering _‘I need to be alone for this...for awhile...I’m so sorry.’_

You turn to find her still naked, your eyes unable to find where to land first - her kiss swollen lips, her shocking eyes, the bruises on her neck and her breasts from when she let you prove how much you miss her. You settle for none, and kiss her instead. She cups your face, so sweetly, and kisses you back. She gives a small laugh, into your lips, when your hand comes to the skin of her waist and she shivers. 

She has a slight smile and she looks at you through the swoop of her blonde hair. “Um...I’m gonna...” She nods toward your bathroom before pulling out of your little morning orbit.

You finish making something that if you called breakfast, Owen might stop speaking to you. There’s an attempt at eggs and some toast, and you make more tea while Dani makes herself at home in your closet. You’re shocked, but not really, when she comes out of the bathroom a few minutes later, fresh and smelling like your soap, wearing your Blondie shirt. 

“Sorry for just showing up like that.” It's the first full sentence either of you have really said to each other since she got here. 

“You don’t need to apologize for anything that happened last night, Poppins.” You take a bite out of a piece of toast, light, easy, worried anything else will shatter this dream you’re, somehow, still having. “As far as I’m concerned, you can break down my door at two in the morning any time you like.” 

She has the sense to look a bit bashful, and you wonder how that shy little smile sits on the same lips that undid you three times last night.

//

Dani is in your space and every corner she peeks into, every surface she touches is like watching her slowly walk out of the fog. 

When you hear the telltale little scratch on your door, you go over and let Weed back in from his morning stroll, and she says, surprised, “You have a cat!” It’s the first thing she’s said that’s _really_ sounded like her since she got here, clear as a bell.

“Thank you for your condolences.” 

Weed jumps right up onto Dani’s lap, sociable nuisance he is. “Oh, you are just so cute.”

“Don’t. We can not inflate his ego any more, or I’ll abandon him, swear.” 

She starts scratching behind his ears, stroking his sandy coat, looking at his smug little face as he gets all the love and attention he wants from her. “No she won’t, don’t listen to her.” 

“I’m serious.”

“We both know Jamie’s a big softie, don’t we?” 

You quirk a playful eyebrow at her. “Should I remind you of the bit where you showed up at _my_ flat, unannounced? I could kick you both to the curb. Would be well within my rights.” 

Weed just purrs away and Dani’s easy smile that reaches her eyes tells you you’ll be doing anything but.

//

She stays with you for nine days and every time you come home from a job, or an errand, she is still there and you marvel at this extended hallucination. She comes to the market and into town with you to bring Weed to the vet, and sits in the passenger seat of your car, fiddling with the radio stations. She buys weird candy at the gas station while you fill up your tank. You get a table at the pub, and just talk, or just drink. When you wake up every morning there’s always a part of her that’s touching you. She cooks, and eats ice cream on your couch right from the container. And it’s May, but you watch White Christmas together, because she mentioned how she was in a dark haze for most of December, and didn’t realize the holidays had passed until she’d written the date down when she sent you that postcard from Anchorage, and it was a new year.

“I was in Vermont.” She says, offhand. 

“When was that?” You expect to hear a time within the last 8 months. To hear about Dani escaping the boarder in her mind by packing it with images of every place on earth. 

“When I was twenty-two.” 

You stare at her, wanting _more, more, more_. You want to know everything about who Dani Clayton was at twenty-two. 

“It was a trip with some friends from college. A big group. My first real trip without Eddie.” She smiles, easy, and you think how unlucky to finally be free of one ghost, just to get another. “ _Spring break._ ” And she giggles because this is somehow funny, and you smile because she’s smiling. “Tickets were cheaper because who wants to go to Vermont for _spring break_?” She shakes her head, like what an absurd little thing she did at twenty-two, and you want to kiss her because she feels like she used to, but she also feels new. Breathing in deep like she possesses all the space in her lungs, as she scoops out another chunk of ice cream and sighs as she turns her eyes back to the movie.

It’s a little while later when she looks at you and says, “You would really like it there.”

//

You’re sitting on your couch, six days in, and Dani is laying down on top of you, head in your crossed lap, your hand playing with her hair as you read a book. It’s simple and quiet, and you never had this with her before. You’ve never had this with anyone. You’ve stolen as much of it as you can, let her steal it too.

You hadn’t had sex again since the first night, but you’ve been more intimate with her than you ever knew you could be with someone. But for all that intimacy, you dance around the reason behind her sudden arrival on your doorstep, do acrobatics around asking why she was in Bly in the first place. You avoid certain roads when you drive, and you know she’s grateful. There is something you need to know, and you are sure you will not like it, but you sense the time is coming, and she’ll tell you the truth if you ask. 

“Did you…”

“Hmm?” Dani turns her head slightly to look at you and you feel so exposed, more vulnerable than you did that first night when she ravaged you. 

“Did you come back for this? For me?”

The silence is your answer. The tears welling up in her eyes and her quivering lip are your answer and you knew all along that if she was ready for you to join her, she would have warned you. You knew when she stepped into your apartment in the dead of night and kissed you like she needed it for something and was desperate to figure out what, and you knew when she gently tugged you back to her mouth as you started to kiss down her body, not able to give up control because she was fighting something that night, and you were her battleground. And all you ever want is to be what Dani needs, but it hurts so fucking much to see her shaking now, sitting up and moving to the other end of the little couch and you let her, trusting now that she won’t disappear into mist. 

It takes her a while to speak. She’s chewing on her thumb and staring at a random point in your kitchen for what feels like an eternity, and you think for the first time she’s processing whatever events led her to your door.

“I was, um...I thought that I was doing better.” She looks at you, like you’d know how she was doing lately, even though she’s told you almost nothing except for sometimes where on the map you might find her if you ever went looking. 

“I thought I was getting better. It was getting...not easier, but less...new. Traveling helped. Moving around helped a lot. Being a little scared to be on my own made it easier to forget what I was really afraid of. I had a lot I needed to focus on, with just me, and it made me exhausted, and it...helped. At least I thought it did.”

You nod when she looks at you. She crosses her arms across her chest, snuggles her feet under your legs to keep them warm.

“But you weren’t?”

“Last month was...hell.” She doesn’t have to elaborate as to why. She knows you’ve done the math, that April was the anniversary of when she watched Eddie die, after breaking free from one cage, only to be met with another type of prison entirely. 

“She’s usually quiet, simmering. But she just... Screamed. And at some point I...I didn’t know if it was her or if it was me anymore? It never stopped. And it wasn’t just noise. I wanted to...rip my hair out. And I wasn’t eating and I couldn’t sleep. And I couldn’t remember where I was, and...I wanted it to end, Jamie, I just wanted her to shut the _fuck up._ ”

Her eyes are closed, and you wonder if she is screaming at Dani right now, screaming at her to--

“You were going to the lake.” It comes out of you like you knew it all along, why she came back, but it’s not accusatory. The simple and hideous truth of it has hung unsaid in the air all week.

Dani shatters. Her hand covers her mouth as she nods, eyes squeezed shut, inhaling a shaking sob, like she only just realized how close to death she came when she crash landed into your body insead. You let her cry, and you hold her hand when you pull it away from her mouth so she can breathe easier.

“Is she still screaming?” 

“No.”

“Do you still want to go to the lake... when you leave here?” Your voice cracks, and you’re looking right at her hand in yours, because you can’t bear the answer and see her face when she says it at the same time.

“Jamie, _no_.” 

“Good... ‘cause I wasn’t gonna let you go anyway.” 

She squeezes your hand and a fresh tear tumbles down her cheek.

“But you’re going to leave.” You say it, and you sound so small. And you’ve never liked sounding this vulnerable, but with Dani, it’s different. She’s quiet for a while, but you know she’s just trying to find the words to tell you why she didn’t accept your offer in the first place. 

And you know you never asked for a commitment or anything grand up front, you would never. You had only offered to be someone to look at in the car next to her, to ask if she should turn right or left at the next stop sign, someone to place a reassuring hand at the small of her back when she felt just a little lost, someone to spend some _todays_ with, some _right nows_ with. But you know in your heart what you really want from her, that you’d be on a floor somewhere, begging her to stay with you if she ever were to make a move to go, whispering promises that you’ll carry anything she can no longer hold so long as you can both take one more step together. 

“I can’t have you be...my anchor, you know? Not for this, maybe for other things, eventually, but...I need to know how to handle _this_ by myself. Does that make sense?”

You understand, you do. For the same reason you know that if she ever did walk into that lake, she would never take another soul down with her, she won’t have you spiraling down the drain of her life while she’s still here to witness it.

“What stopped you? Why’d you come here instead?”

She looks at you and her expression grows slowly into this lovely thing you don’t expect, a blush blooming on her chest, a smile seeping into her lips behind her hand, trying to cover it a little. She fails tremendously to hide it, but you think there was very little effort to begin with.

You nudge her leg playfully, but you also want a serious answer and she knows.

“I really just...I needed to remember? I’d been feeling...so numb. For months. And everything that happened felt like...centuries ago. Like, I knew it was only a few months but I just felt...ancient? And I hadn’t felt joy, felt alive, since...I hadn’t ever felt as alive as I did then when I was with you. Everything, _everything_ , about that night was _right_.” She pauses, comes a little closer to you on the couch and you push some of her hair out of her eyes. “And I needed...I needed to remember. Because it all happened so fast after that, Jay. We didn’t really get our chance to be happy.” 

You nod, because you feel that crater too. You feel how you were robbed. You remember the one, perfect evening before hell swallowed it whole, with you all laughing at the table, still in the same clothes you picked up off Dani’s floor that morning, Hannah and Owen passing knowing looks every time you touched Dani next to you, allowing your hand to linger and Dani looking so absolutely _free_.

“I was in Japan.”

Your eyes go wide, because you knew she took a plane to get to England, but you didn’t think she’d travelled sixteen hours to end her life.

“Yeah...” She’s picking at the sleeves of your sweater, on her body. “But flights that long...with nothing to do but think. And when I thought about _you_ it was... _so hard_ to remember. I could feel her trying to stop me from thinking about you, _really_ thinking about you, about being with you. She knew I was getting closer to Bly, so. She was...so strong. I think...I think she knew you were, I don’t know, stronger? She fought me...so hard. And I just knew...that if she was trying that hard to make me forget...then it had to be worth it. It took everything in me to push her down. I think I really freaked some people out on the plane though.” She laughs a little, self-deprecating and shrugs and says simply, “It was you or her. I picked you. I’d do it again, I know I can now.”

You don’t realize your crying until Dani wipes away a tear that’s rolling down your cheek and kisses your trembling lips. 

“Come here,” she whispers, “I’m here,” and she proves it as you adjust your bodies on the couch so you can curl yourself into her, her arms holding you tight as you bury your face in her neck and sob. And you know she can not stay in Bly much longer, but you know that no matter where she is, she will not let you go.

//

You eat dinner on the couch that night, close together, unable to really pull away from the gravity of each other, and you don’t really talk much, but you feel more connected to her right now than you ever have. 

When you get up to fill your glass with water, she grabs your wrist and stops you, and she’s looking up at you with this pleading desire in her eyes, and you are still and you watch her chest rise and fall with her breath as her gaze traces its way down your body and up again, so slowly, and you feel on display in the most electric way. She tugs you down to her, and when you kiss her, it feels like planting the seed of your favorite flower. 

You take her to bed the same way you’ve been dreaming about for months, the same way you discovered Dani Clayton for the very first time. With one hand threaded through hers, the other curled around her thigh as you use your mouth to bring her right to the cusp, before slipping into her with one finger, then two, so easily. You get absolutely lost in her needy sighs and desperate moans of your name, watching her flushed skin and her head pressed into your bed and her stomach muscles clenching and she’s gorgeous, her hands in your hair and her hips twisting down to chase you as you run her right off the edge. 

//

You spend the rest of the night wrapped in each other in every way you’ve imagined. You’re both spent enough to just lie there in the silence of your steady breath, the dew evaporating off your skin, and Dani curls into your side and you hold her as you drift. 

“So...what’s next?”

“Hmm?” Dani opens her droopy eyelids and gives you a little smile and whispers into your shoulder, “Anything you want.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Anything...Anywhere you want and I’ll meet you there.”

It’s so much. It’s everything. More than you’ve ever been offered, and you wrap your arms around her waist and hang on. 

“You’re sure?”

“Jamie... _yes_.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“You have to bring the cat, though.”

“Oh, god... Well let’s forget the whole thing then.”

She shoves your hip a little and you both just laugh and it’s so fucking perfect and she kisses you, and you’re _happy_ , and you think it feels like peace. Blooming in the night. Looking out into the galaxy. Chosen and lucky. 

//

You drive Dani to the train and it is so unlike the last time. She’s glued to you until the very last second, hands running along your cheeks like she’s committing the shape of you to memory, and with one last kiss, she’s gone. 

You lean into your sadness about it and eat the rest of the ice cream she left in your freezer in bed because it feels like such a unique brand of self-pity that you’ve never tried out before. But she calls you as soon as she gets to the little hotel she’s staying at in Amsterdam, and when you answer the phone you can feel the two of you stepping into a new phase of understanding, like you are finally sprouting something real and alive after taking in so much water and so much sun you thought you’d drown or burn. She talks, _so much_ , that you feel your chest swell with it.

She tells you about the absolute nightmare of a train delay that set her _‘four hours behind, Jamie.’_ She gives you her hotel information, her room number, just so you know where and how to reach her. It’s no longer just vague countries she’ll mention she is in when you ask her, it’s the details now, the colors. She likes the sheets on her bed here, and the pasteis de nata they sell at the coffee shop on the corner. She tells you what she’s going to do tomorrow, and she tells you about it the next day after she’s done it. She tells you she misses you, and she tells you, plainly, in a way she never has before, when she feels the lady. Her echos, her rage. You listen, and you can feel the sprout that you now are growing a hopeful little leaf because of it.

After two weeks, she moves on to Prague, and she tells you about chimney cakes and how she ate one with chocolate on the inside as she walked up a winding road to a palace at the top of a hill. And she tells you about a dream she had, that wasn’t hers, but she can’t remember all of it now.

In Copenhagen, she tells you with glee that she’s met two boys that she’ll be travelling with for a couple of weeks. Will and Ben, two very charming young men from Canada, who, like Dani, had to find freedom for themselves. You’re wary of them just a little, until Will grabs the phone from Dani one day and has you smiling wide with his funny, addicting charm, and a subtle melody in his voice when he gets excited that lets you know Dani is safe with him. His voice lowers slightly, no longer putting on a show and you can tell Dani has given up trying to get the phone back from him. He is so fucking earnest when he tells you how lucky you are, how wonderful Dani is, how she looks when she talks about you, that you want to cry.

//

You tell her things too, just like you always have. But now you tell her about Bly, no longer shying away from it like a secret, no longer scared she’ll hang up on you and never call again.

It’s June now, and you’re almost through training the new groundskeeper who will take over for you next month. The work at the house is more maintenance now than actually making the place look nice for living or for Owen’s food demands. You don’t feel guilty, leaving the haunted bits out when you tell Jim, the new guy, all about the manor.

You need to not be in Bly anymore. This chapter ended months ago when Dani kissed you goodbye with a promise of more. You don’t need to be here, to stand guard around this lake in case your lover returns, but not to you. Dani has told you, with increasing conviction, how good she feels. And there are words for what you feel now, for what you’ve felt for some time, and at the end of every phone call when you linger before goodbye, every postcard signed _‘Yours always, Dani’_ , you feel the tug getting stronger to be in her arms so you can say them.

You tell Dani that you’ve found a flower shop on the outer edges of London that offered you a job. You’re nervous, it’s a bit more high end than you’re used to, they do weddings, and fancy parties, and all that, and you worry they will see right through your skin and see how unfit you are for it. She soothes your fears, and you laugh so loud when she asks, teasing, in her teacher voice, if you want her to quiz you on all the types of flowers so you do well on your first day. You always hated school, but you tell Dani if she had been your teacher, you’d be a rocket scientist by now. 

//

You tell Stan that you’re ending your lease, and it’s not until you see that he looks genuinely sad to hear it, that you realize you have a friend in him, and you will miss his warm eyes and your dart games and the way he’d slide a beer your way without a word after what he could tell was a stressful day.

He helps you pack up your car when you've boxed up your life here, and it all fits into the trunk. He hugs you, and when he wishes you well, and asks you to call every now and then. You tell him you will and you mean it. 

//

You move into your new flat on the first of July, and you have an actual full bedroom. It’s almost double the size of your old place, and it’s more space than you know what to do with it. Henry had given you a sizable check on your last day, and you’d feel bad taking this extra money from the Wingraves, but they’re good people, and their lake witch did possess your girlfriend, so you don’t object. You use some of it to buy some new furniture and a really comfortable mattress. You know though, you’d be happy with blank walls, sleeping right on the floor if you could have just the one thing you’d really like in this flat with you.

You open a savings account for the rest, and when you get home from the bank, you sit at your small table in your honest to god _kitchen_ , and have a cup of tea in the comforting silence of all this newness, and you can’t quite believe it. On top of it all, savings is not something you ever thought you’d have. 

You think of the girl you were, angry and a fucking mess, before sinking your hands into dirt for the first time inside of a cage, trying so hard to bury yourself, to get deep enough to burn, but discovering treasure instead, discovering freedom. She’d probably roll her eyes and taunt you, spit at your feet if you caught her on a good day, and tell you that your life is fragile and stupid, that nothing works out, and no one is looking out for you, so you might as well fuck it all to hell.

You hold her within you, and you think about time. You think about age. You think of something Dani said when she had called you on your birthday, with her ever growing worldly wisdom wrapping you up like a quilt, that you are not just the age you are today, but that you are, always, every age you have ever been, and that you can hold and love them all. That they stack up like rings on trees, making you sturdy and tall and strong.

It’s true, or a good way to think at least, because you hear her still, that mean and bitter child inside of you, warning you it’s too good to last, that Dani couldn’t return to you, your efforts and hope are for nothing. That even if she did, she’ll run, because what could you possibly offer her that would make her want to stay? But you also hear a counter from the woman you were that night when you held Dani’s face in your hands against the door to her room in a manor, after ripping open your chest and showing her all the things that make you ache, asking _‘You’re sure?’,_ who knows what it’s like to be gently tugged down into something beautiful and know you will be caught. You let both of them speak and let their thoughts pass through your branches like a breeze, without judgement, because they’re both just trying to protect you. And when you go to the store down the road to make a copy of your new key, you feel yourself growing another layer, another ring, stretching you wider and taller and surer, and you think, maybe it’s not so scary, taking up space.

//

Your new job is incredible. You bring a fresh sort of youth to the shop that you didn’t think you possessed after being surrounded by so much old and so much boring for the last three years, but it’s a new feeling to be valued like this, for your natural taste and your eye.

You’re shocked, really, how quickly you become the go-to person in the shop to chat with all the young brides-to-be looking to break away from their mother’s tastes, to go with something a bit more tasteful, a bit less dated, a bit more natural and easy. You’re also quite taken with the older men who come into the shop, always dressed so sharp, shopping for their wives. Classic, and simple, you think, giving the gift of flowers once a week to a woman you love. Proving with each new batch that your love lives, even still. That showing it still matters, even now. You find that, like this, people are wonderful, when all they expect of you is your passion for plants, and the dread you felt about having a job that deals with customers all day dissipates faster than you thought it would. 

When you get the chance to, you love helping out with big, splashy weddings. It’s certainly not anything you’d have for yourself - when your mind drifts to anything resembling forever you know you’d be happy with just one droopy peace lily if it meant getting Dani’s hand in yours until you turn to dust - but you love the fun of it, the possibility, that delicious push of creativity you’ve never gotten to experience, and you’re so good at it, it shocks you at every turn.

//

You meet Dani, Will, and Ben in the center of London and you think, as you step out of the underground and find three sets of arms, one set of lips, and who you think is Ben saying _“She’s so hotttt!”,_ that maybe you can reclaim all the pain this city has given you, like how land sometimes needs to be completely set ablaze in order to grow new things. Maybe you can tell all the misery this city spat at your small and lost body to go fuck itself, with Dani’s hand in yours as the match you’ll strike against any surface you find.

You brought a small bunch of flowers with you, some of your absolute favorites from the shop, and when Dani sees them in your hand, she looks up at you with wide, glimmering eyes. 

“Wow...these are…” She’s a little breathless, at the gesture. And you struggle to contain a laugh at her expression when you tell her:

“Oh, these aren’t for you. These are for the boys that kept you from walking into creepy alleys for the last three months. For you, I kept the cat.”

Will and Ben scream their love for you, instantly. And you kiss Dani’s laugh, and tell her, as you walk hand in hand with her behind Will and Ben, “Don’t worry...I will always have flowers for you.”

You spend the whole night outside, and you discover exactly why Dani attached to these sweet boys like glue. You don’t party, or go dancing, or anything like you feared they’d drag you into. You’re grateful, because you’re not old, but you’ve lived too much already, and now you just want peace. They were in Naples this morning, and they brought back all sorts of treats for you to try tonight. Will has a little radio, and you all sit along the Thames listening to music with a couple bottles of wine that were stashed in a leather backpack slung around Dani’s shoulder that you’ve never seen before. She got it in Budapest, she tells you, _‘Isn’t it so nice?’_ and you want to grab her face right then and whisper into her lips how she deserves every nice thing on Earth, so you do. 

You watch the sun set and the boats drift, and you laugh when they tell you about all the good, wonderful things they’ve seen and done in the last three months when they decided to just stick together indefinitely. Dani looks at you while Will and Ben recount some incident from Venice when one of them almost fell into the canal, and when you catch her eye, you feel yourself slipping into a little dimension with just her, just for a few seconds, that’s entirely your own. A sweet little smile paints her lips and though you haven’t said the words to each other yet, you feel so inexplicably loved by her. 

It’s quiet, and your shirt sticks a little to your back because it’s August, but you watch the buildings gleam gold, and the water ripple below you, and Dani leans into your side and slides her hand onto your thigh like it belongs there, because it does. Ben and Will kiss you both on the cheek, wish you goodnight, and walk off wrapped up in one another back to their hotel, and it’s just the two of you then, Dani’s head on your shoulder, her legs across your lap, your arms wrapped around her to keep her close. She tells you, a little sadly, but mostly happy, that she’s never had friends like them. 

You stay like this for a while and you feel her head getting heavier against you, leaning on you in such a way that makes your heart grow to make more space for her you never knew you could give. Your skin buzzes with her proximity and the wine, like all the electricity you’ve been storing up inside of you finally has a place to go.

She sleepily turns to look up at you, eyes big and tired and _happy_ , and whispers, “Take me home?”

“Of course,” you say it into her hair, and kiss her forehead, just like you did all those months ago. You kiss her forehead, and this time, she’s staying. You gather up your things, and hold Dani’s hand firm because she’s trying to stay close to you but she’s much more drunk than you are and she keeps drifting away and clunking back into your body, and she pretends to get mad when you laugh at her for it.

You grab a cab back to your flat and Dani grumbles when you tell her you’re on the third floor. 

“You know, for someone who hasn’t stopped globe trotting for over a year,” you say as you tug her along up the stairs, “you sure’ve got a lot of fuckin’ nerve complaining about two flights of stairs.” 

On the first landing she pushes you up against the wall and after almost missing your mouth entirely, kisses you, deep, with an elated sort of giggle and her hands clutching your collar. You let yourself get absolutely lost in it, tasting and touching this new version of her, because you know when you manage to get her up another flight of stairs and through the door to your flat, you’re plopping her and a tall glass of water and two aspirin right into your bed. 

You've never met Dani _this_ drunk before, and you think maybe, neither has she, because she has a vocabulary that makes the both of you flush and sends a sharp jolt through your belly when she tells you _exactly_ what you’re missing out on when you tell her _‘Not tonight, Poppins. Need you a bit more coordinated for that.’_

You get into bed and she pulls you closer, kisses you again, slow and sleepy. She pulls at your shirt and whispers a pained little _‘please’_ and it’s not heady, it’s just pure, _‘need you close.’_ You need it too, to feel that it’s real, that she’s here. You pull your sleep shirt off, then your shorts, and so does she, and you pull the sheet back over the both of you and tangle your limbs together in your favorite kind of knot. 

Everything that’s been buzzing in your veins over the last several hours since her lips met yours, since her hand hasn’t stopped touching you like a tether, it all stills with your steady breathing, and there’s peace as you drift into sleep holding her close. 

//

You wake up, and it’s so much like the first time. You’re alone in bed, and it feels like the opposite of waking up from a good dream and being dragged back to the banality of living, when you realize everything good is slipping through your fingers like mist. You wake, and yesterday builds more solidly into reality each second. And Dani isn’t next to you, but she’s _here_. You know it from the sweet scent of fresh water and soap from your bathroom, and from her clothes that are now neatly folded and stacked on top of your dresser, from the sounds of the kettle in your kitchen, and from what all of it does in your chest.

You pull on some clothes and walk out of your bedroom to find her, hair damp, one hand scratching a delighted Weed behind the ears on the counter, the other fixing up two mugs of tea, and it’s lovely to know this is yours now. 

“I thought your intention was for me to let you stay. You sure you want me to try this, Poppins?” You eye the mugs warily. 

“I think I’ve gotten better at tea.”

You take a sip and, sure enough, some things never change.

“No?”

“‘fraid not.”

“Maybe you’re just hard to please.”

“Hmm...” You push the mug away and curl your hand around her waist. “I wouldn’t say _that._ ”

You kiss her, and for the first time in what feels like ages, you’re not thinking about her slipping away. You kiss her like you have time, because you do. You’re not stealing moments anymore, and no back part of your mind is trained on the sands slipping through an hourglass. It’s slow and intoxicating and full and intentional, and you’re both here in your kitchen in London with everything you’ve got.

“I was thinking…” you say, when you finally pull away, “I could take you on a proper date?”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright.”

“I’ve just never really…”

“What?”

“Haven’t done this, really. I mean I have, you know? But...not like this. Feels different. Feels a bit backwards.”

“You mean the part where I’m moving in, but you haven’t even officially asked me to be your girlfriend?”

“Yeah, you know, I think maybe we can fix that bit.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. If it sounds good to you, sounds good to me.”

A delighted little giggle bubbles up in Dani’s chest as she nods, and you’re both just beaming at each other until you kiss her. Your laughs settle, and she rests her forehead against yours, just taking you in.

And it’s not like you planned anything grand to tell her, maybe you would have on your date tonight, or later in bed, and you’re so sure she knows already, just how you know she feels the same, but you say “I love you,” and she hugs you so tight and kisses the words back into your lips. 

You feel strong, sturdy roots growing out underneath where you stand in this spot, in this kitchen, holding her, that you didn’t expect to feel. It feels like solid ground, like stability, like layers of soft grass and hard soil and millions of years of stone supporting your body as you lie down on the earth and look up at the galaxy, and you know, with Dani, it will always feel like this.

\\\

You decide to take Dani out for a simple night. An easy night. Dinner and a movie. A type of date so classic in its simplicity it scares you, a type of date she’s done a hundred times before on auto pilot, a type of date you’ve done exactly never. 

You allow yourself to panic about it for exactly as long as it takes for Dani to run back to Will and Ben’s hotel room to collect her backpack and small suitcase, and when she arrives back, wearing the clothes she borrowed from your closet that morning, she rests all of her worldly possessions in your room on the side of the bed that she woke up on that morning. It looks like someone’s returned from a short trip, is all. Just coming home after a week away to see family, or for business. Simple, you think, coming home, but it’s so much more. You don’t think the idea of Dani planting her roots next to yours will ever not knock you completely over. It feels so right when she kisses you like she hasn’t seen you all day.

Dani picks Beetlejuice at the ticket stand, and at first you’re not entirely sure it’s the right choice, spirits and haunted houses and all, but it turns out, you both fucking loved it. Once Dani had noticed how tense you were about the material, she’d taken your hand and rested it in her lap, and squeezed it until you relaxed a bit, leaned in close to you and whispered with a little smile, _‘It’s ok, Jamie. I will not allow Tim Burton to send me over the edge.’_ She didn’t let your hand go the whole time, and the steady, sure press of her, her fingers threading with yours, her hands tracing patterns on your forearm was enough to toss your fears into the backseat. It wasn’t exactly the type of movie you ever thought you’d say you could relate to, personally, but life is full of fun little surprises like that, you suppose.

It is something new, something wholly unexpected, being able to _laugh_ about it all, of the truth of everything that happened. You know about grief, about fear, how it comes in waves, and how it manifests in different shapes. It will never not be terrifying, what happened at Bly, but you welcome it, because while it will never not be terrifying, you learn that you do not always have to _be_ terrified. You always let Dani set the tone for these conversations, but when she so bluntly drops a cheeky little joke about it after the movie lets out, it takes you completely by surprise, and you both end up in a fit of laughter. You take it with greedy hands, because it’s a fuck of a lot better than being scared of that dark box in the corner of her mind, than letting the unknown of it, the fear of it, seep into what you have with Dani like poison. You take it with greedy hands because the way Dani’s eyes shine with tears and she says _‘I’m crying’_ even though she isn’t, really, even though she’s saying it through a smile so big she can’t for the life of her break, is so much better than letting any of that hopeless darkness win.

\\\

Your roots with Dani grow, and they web out throughout the city as the days, weeks, months pass. Dani gets a few tutoring jobs, and sets up a little desk and a bookshelf in the corner of your living room, and she decorates it with things she’s collected, movie tickets and candles, all the corks from the wine you drink together, and small pots that she tells you she needs plants for, so you fill them up for her. Always, every week, you place fresh flowers in a vase for her on the window sill next to her desk. She has a preferred coffee shop, and a favored branch of the library, and you only go to the movie theater that’s right by the bar you both like so you can get a drink after, and you know the best spot for takeaway Indian that delivers to your flat in under 30 minutes. 

She hasn’t been able to put down a new book she got from the shop this afternoon that she’s reading for the kids she tutors, and you love her like this. You make her tea and bring her dinner as she bounces from your couch, to your bed, to your kitchen table, flipping pages like if she doesn't know it ends, she’ll combust. She only quickly glances up, not once folding the book closed, but she kisses you in thanks every time. You fall asleep next to her, with her lamp still on as she reads, and you wake up somewhere around one in the morning to her weeping, staring at the cover of a little girl sitting atop a crate surrounded by piles of books.

“Hey...you alright?”

She sniffles, and you reach your hand out to her arm. “Yeah, just...really loved this book, is all.” 

“That’s good, no?”

She looks over to you, and smiles. “Yeah, it’s good...I’m just. I’m really lucky, you know? That I have you.”

“Oh, love.”

“It’s just...some people. Like me. Like us...they aren’t really lucky at first. They don’t really have the kind of people who want them. Not in the right way at least. Not in the way they need. But sometimes...all it takes is just a little magic. And a decision to stick together because...it’s better that way. Happier.”

You hold her hand, your thumb drawing little patterns on her palm, until she’s ready to put the book back on her nightstand and sink into the covers with you. 

She falls asleep with her head on your chest, and the next morning she wakes you with sweet kisses to your jaw and her hands tracing their way up your ribs, her nails lightly scratching along your skin in that way that makes you wonder just how long she’s been awake, just how long she’s been needing you.

You turn to face her, and you kiss her fully, and she exhales a sigh against your lips as you slip a thigh between her legs and wrap your hands around her back and down to her hips and pull her in close, an easy, lazy rhythm unfolding. You’re already feeling more awake than you ought to be, and you focus on her lips, on her neck, your hands lazily mapping every inch of skin you can find. You love everything about her like this, when you can build her up slowly, like the morning sun creeping through your window, listening to her breathy, sleepy little moans, her hands growing steadily greedier to pull you closer, knowing it’s not enough to finish her, the possibilities endless of how she’ll crave you next to get her there, of how she’ll ask. 

You kiss the column of her neck, trail her sleep shirt up and tug it over her head. You twist fully on top of her, and she wraps her legs around you and she kisses you deep with one hand in your hair and one digging into the small of your back to push you closer to where she needs you. You know her body well enough now to know exactly what she needs when she’s like this, but you still wait for her to tell you, because it’s so lovely to hear her ask with her voice high and pleading, with her hands clutching your sleep shirt tight. When you make her wait just a little bit longer to get it she’s at her most addicting, with her desperate, frustrated little noises making you tremble, and her skin is so hot it feels like it was made to brand you. 

When you finally slip your hand into her shorts, you take your time as you lightly rub small circles on her clit, just enough to drive her crazy, just enough to send her hips driving toward you for more and her hands are grasping at your back, in your hair, and when you finally sink into her with two fingers you taste her moans and her gasps like sugar on your tongue. With each thrust she is more expressive, more open for you, clinging to you tighter and you love Dani any way she lets you have her, but being above her like this, inside of her like this, surrounded by her like this just might be your favorite thing, you think, right up until you’re proven entirely wrong and you know nothing will ever be better than how her voice cracks when she says your name against your lips as she tightens around your fingers and you feel her pulsing around you as she comes completely undone. 

You kiss her as she comes down and her breath settles and she lets out this sad little moan when you pull your hand from her shorts and before you know it, your shirt is off and she has you on your back and her hands are undoing the drawstring to your shorts and pushing them down your legs with your underwear. 

“Good morning,” you say through a delighted little laugh as she tosses your underwear dramatically over her shoulder and starts kissing your breasts. You push her hair out of her eyes and arch into her when she bites down lightly. 

“Very good morning.” She comes up to kiss you, slowly at first, her body still thrumming from her orgasm, but then she slips her tongue against yours at the same time she curls her hand around your backside, and she knows when she does this you turn to putty in her hands. She’s kissing back down your body, sucking marks into your neck, in between your ribs, into the inside of your thigh as she settles between your legs. And it’s not like you need much by way of build up. Helping Dani had been more than enough. You let out a soft little moan as she licks into you slowly, and her lips and her tongue are like velvet and her mouth is so hot against you and it feels so good to be chosen by Dani just like this. It feels so good to be hers, as she sucks a little harder and you curse, so good to be _you_ , when she slides two fingers into you and you cry her name with your hand in her hair. 

She's looking up at you with a glint of mischievousness in her eyes that should not be allowed this early in the morning, that has only grown more bold, more confident, over the last few months as she’s taken her time getting to know your body. She curls her fingers in a slow, deliberate, rhythm that she knows will only draw you out longer, that she knows will keep you hanging in the balance just a little bit more. 

Her other hand comes up to tangle with yours when she knows you’re almost there, and she speeds up her thrusts, stroking you in the exact right spot. It doesn’t take much after that. You’re rocking against her mouth, urging her deeper, and she squeezes your hand tight as your body goes taut and she coaxes you through it just how she knows you like it best. 

When your muscles are jelly and you’re catching your breath, you find her looking up at you from where her head rests on your thigh, her hand tracing circles on your hip. You pull her up to you, and she tugs the covers back up over your bodies and you settle against one another, tucked into her neck and your arms circling around her waist. You rest like that, for a while. Lazy mornings where neither of you have anywhere to be are your absolute favorite. They’re peaceful, even if you’re both using the time to clean the flat, or run errands together, or spend the day in bed, sometimes like this, sometimes not. 

There’s something beautiful to it, having Dani come back into your orbit and instead of drifting back off again, choosing to grasp on to you with all her might, choosing to grasp on to each other. There’s something, you think, to fusing together in this way, charting a new path in the galaxy, into something wonderful with the sheer force of your collision, the sheer will to hold on and create something new.

You hear Weed clawing at the door, and you laugh when she tells you she locked him out of the room before she woke you up. 

\\\

You take a holiday to Vermont over Christmas, and you’ve never fallen in love with a place before, sort of always just stuck your roots where you landed, never allowing them to grow too deep, repotted yourself when necessary, but you feel the sparks against your shoes with every step, and your chest expands with a beautiful blend of excitement and stillness every time you smell the sweet air. Dani feels it too, you know it every time she tugs your hand and pulls you around a corner to see what else you can unwrap on these streets, and on your last day you both share this dreadfully sad look about the thought of getting on a plane back to London, and you extend your trip for a few more days, just because you can. 

You’ve only really been living in London for about five months, and you still have some time left on your lease, but you can tell every time something goes wrong in the flat that you don’t quite have the energy to properly fix, every time Dani debates if she really needs to hang up that picture in the hall, that maybe, really, neither of you want to stay there much longer. Dani talks about missing the snow, and how the kids she tutors pick on her for misspelling English words, and even though you like your job, you complain a bit too loudly about how much more you would like to be to be running your own shop, calling the shots for yourself.

The decision isn’t even really one when you both make it. When you get home from work on that evening in early May, you let Dani know you ran into the landlord downstairs and he wanted to know if you’d be renewing your lease. You’d both looked at each other with the most blank, noncommittal stares that made you both burst into laughter. 

“Let’s move to Vermont, why the fuck not.”

You don’t even expect Dani to push back with platitudes about why it would be logical to stay. Her eyes light up like she’s been bursting to say it when the time was right anyway. You know there is no point wasting time in a place you don’t love. You’ve done wasting time. Dani has done wasting time. All you want now, is to just chase the peace with her, anywhere you can. 

As you and Dani pack up your flat, you think about space. You think about love, and possession. How growing another layer of age makes you happy, makes you brave, when that year has been marked with joy. How Dani’s possessions have grown considerably over the course of that year, proving with every new sweater, with the handmade earrings she got at the market, with the bowl she bought for Weed’s food that is in her favorite color, that she’s here, and she’s not afraid to take up space, too. 

\\\

\\\

Jamie looks at you from the drivers side of your car on a road trip, sunglasses on and curly hair blowing in the wind, or from across your kitchen island as she pours you a glass of prosecco on your first night in your new apartment in Vermont, or as she pushes open the door to the back room of your shop after closing with a suggestive twinkle in her eye, and you’ll always ache for that year you made her wait. But as you open the door to your apartment after a trip to the bank after you closed up your shop for the evening, a sad little potted plant and a secret in your hand, you know that it without a doubt saved your life.

It starts and ends with you holding out your hand. You give her the plant, move to help mold dinner into something she knows only you can save, your heart in your throat with the rest up to Jamie to discover something you’ve known you wanted with her for years now, really, but have been too fucking damaged to ask. It’s not like you thought about the mechanics really, ahead of time, putting the ring in a plant for her to unearth. You’d had it in your pocket for about four months now, and you’re honestly shocked she hadn’t discovered it by accident because she steals your jackets all the time. But when you were walking back home, you saw it and it struck you, sitting atop a pile of discarded books, and you’d remembered, with a sharp clarity you’d been trying to fog up, just how close you, too, had come to death when you steered your fate into Jamie’s arms instead. 

You hear it in her voice, that confused little lilt when she turns to look at you, holding it like she’s not quite sure it’s an accident, but hoping desperately it is not, like she could absolutely expect you to say _‘No clue where that came from’_ and carry on with your evening where you exist as one already. But it’s not an accident, you tell her. Nothing about being with Jamie has ever been an accident. It’s only ever been deliberate, been a choice, the best choice, one that you make every day with absolute joy, one that you will make over and over, over anything else, as long as you know how. And you can’t technically get married, you know that, but you can make promises. And Jamie has never broken a single promise to you. So you ask her if she will keep one more.

She’s trembling and laughing and holding you tight, dinner burning but who even cares, kissing you and loving you in this spot in your kitchen, and you aren’t scared about the future, not when you get _this_. Not when you know that you can and will always, _always_ pick Jamie.

You have plans now, stretching years ahead that you know you’ll be here for. Plans you’re not afraid to make and share with her, promises you whisper into her laugh lines that you know you’ll get to keep as you run your fingers through her hair from where it’s started growing silver at her temples, and trace the ring on her finger that you put there. And it’s not always easy, there are nights the dreams come, there are days, weeks, where all your effort goes into locking the lady back into a box, but every time Jamie is there, holding your hand, and kissing you when you’re free again, reminding you of the joy of loving her, and it’s worth it, and you’d do it a thousand times more just knowing she’s on the other side of it all.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "home to you" by sigrid
> 
> come talk to me at goldenslumbersfanfiction on tumblr ✨


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